6 Responses

  1. kalibar
    kalibar January 18, 2009 at 12:12 am |

    You’re trying to wildly rationalize this purchase, perhaps to yourself more than anyone. You’ve been openly critical of the first-gen MacBook Air’s monstrous performance limitations in the past, and you were spot-on back then. $999 for a refurb is certainly a smaller cash outlay, but the MB Air is still a less-than-wonderful value proposition in terms of performance, screen real estate, and connectivity.

    The baseline comparison PC is still Lenovo’s ThinkPad X200. It’s a 12.1″ ultraportable with an Intel P8400 (or P8600) processor, a so-so Intel X4500 graphics solution, a full 2.5″ SATA driveslot, an admittedly-lame 1280×800 resolution, and an 8-9 hour battery life if you’re willing to tolerate the 9-cell (proportionately less on the optional 6- and 4-cell batteries). It stomps the MB Air in connectivity: it’s got GigE, SD reader, 54mm ExpressCard slot, and it’s dockable. The base config is $877 if you’ve got access to Lenovo EPP (which I’m sure you do), but it does swell up to $944 after you add WiFi-N, Bluetooth, and the 9-cell. They charge $95 extra to stick a 3-year warranty on it.

    The most obvious consideration in an X200 vs. refurb MB Air comparison is the footprint. X200 is sneakily an inch narrower, but the MB Air certainly wins big on thickness and has an advantage on weight, too. Another X200 showstopper is whether or not you can hack it with the pointstick mouse: this has been holding me back, but I pulled out my old 14″ ThinkPad a couple weeks ago have been going pointstick-only to see if I can deal. I’ll confess that an Apple touchpad is still superior, but I’m plenty skilled with the pointstick now and would do just fine on an X200. Enough internet crazies swear by the stupid pointstick that it surely has its merits over a long timeline.

    So when you get right down to it, the big question becomes whether or not anodized aluminum, OS X, and super-thinness are worth the colossal performance and connectivity sacrifices that have to be made — those sacrifices are the “Apple Tax” in this scenario, not cash. I thought I had made the “switch” to Apple when I picked up a Penryn-based MBP early last year, but the complete lack of configurable options and the ever-tougher-to-justify price premiums have pushed me back into Lenovo’s loving arms as I shop for an ultraportable to finally downsize my laptop and to wash the foul taste of my netbook’s terrible performance and worthless resolution down.

    It’s a very personal choice, and if you’ve got any kind of attachment to OS X (which I can’t stand) or its applications then this is pretty much a waste of keystrokes — the decision was over before it started.

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  2. Christopher Price
    Christopher Price January 18, 2009 at 4:10 am |

    So you’re saying that if the Mac mini was $249, I should still be critical of its shortcomings? Because, percentage-wise, that is what you’re saying.

    It goes without saying that I was openly critical of the first-generation MacBook Air. I’ve said in previous postings that the second-generation MacBook Air addressed all of my complaints. I’ve had folks in Apple tell me personally that I helped make that change happen.

    However, at $999, the first-gen MacBook Air is priced right. When you cut a system’s price by 45%, shortcomings become easy to rationalize… you’re getting less… but paying a lot less.

    And, even if I didn’t like OS X, I’d still buy the Mac… for the hardware. In fact, I’m writing this post from my Air booted into Windows 7 (no, I didn’t reboot into it to prove a point, I was actually working in Windows on it). As PC World put it best, MacBooks are the most powerful PC notebooks in each of their classes.

    And, as I’ve said in the past, Apple does a better job of Windows driver maintenance than the PC OEMs. Apple’s software update tool actually pushes out driver updates for each and every driver component… automatically. I’d pay money to have Dell/HP/Acer do that reliably and consistently.

    P.S. No ragging on Lenovo however. I think the S9 and S10 are top-notch. I may even get one at some point…

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  3. kalibar
    kalibar January 18, 2009 at 7:44 am |

    Well, if a refurb Mac mini was $249 while a comparably tiny PC box with much faster internals and more connectivity options was priced at $245 (highly unlikely!), then yeah, I’d be uncomfortable recommending the mini.

    Everything should be evaluated relative to its competitors, and to that end I don’t think the first-gen Air represents a good value here in 2009 when Lenovo’s X200 exists at its price point. As I said before, the comparison is open to interpretation: if the X200’s increased thickness over the Air is a dealbreaker for you (or any customer), then it’s game over right away, the Mac wins.

    Personally, I see the X200’s size as highly manageable, and actually prefer a 12″ width to the Air’s decreased thickness. I’m in the same camp as you (and probably half the internet) in believing that a theoretical 12″ MacBook Pro with punchy internals — if done right — could be an absolutely legendary machine.

    And I hate to keep going against the grain here, but I’ve been running Vista SP1 on my 15″ early-2008 MacBook Pro exclusively for the past 4 months (save for recently when I started playing with the 7 beta… again, like half of the internet), and I’ve been highly unimpressed with Apple’s Windows support. I realize that it’s not their OS, they don’t -really- want you running Windows on a Mac anyway, why should they bother making the competitor’s product look its best on their platform, blah blah blah, myriad of reasons. While I didn’t have any complaints about the Boot Camp tool for delivering and updating the drivers, the drivers themselves leave a lot to be desired:

    For starters, the Apple touchpad driver for Windows is terrible, and fails to provide support for much of the cool stuff you can do with the touchpad in OS X — no two-finger tap-to-click, no pinch/rotate/zoom (this isn’t even mapped to basic CTRL+/CTRL- commands), and certainly no three-finger forward/back. The palm check is also really out of whack, and the touchpad seems to register many more “junk touches” than it does in OS X. Also, the brightness controls are a little wonky. When I resume my MBP from sleep in Vista, it forgets my brightness setting every time and blasts me with 100% LED-backlit brightness. Additionally, there is apparently no way to disable/enable Bluetooth or to adjust fan speed (a la smcFanControl) in Windows. These both require OS X reboots. The keyboard is obviously ill-suited for Windows, but that’s pretty apparent going into the purchase (and you can obviously remap a bunch of crap with third-party utilities if necessary). Power management vs. OS X’s has been pegged as a concern in the past, but as of the latest Boot Camp drivers I’ve found myself scoring nearly equivalent battery life in both OS’s, which is nice to see.

    While you can certainly get away with dual-booting Windows on a desktop iMac, Mac mini, or Mac Pro, I think it’s still disingenuous to suggest that an Apple notebook is a good fit for someone looking to run Windows nearly exclusively.

    I can’t comment on Dell and HP’s driver experience in recent years because I’ve been a shameless Lenovo-only customer, and have been pleased with that experience. I don’t install any of the Lenovo Windows utilities, but they have a support page that’s kept up to date with packaged-up copies of the newest drivers available for all the stuff in your system. Thanks to the geeks over at ThinkWiki, getting ThinkPad hardware working properly in Linux is well-documented and usually pretty trivial.

    The S10 is actually the netbook I own, and while I feel that it fairly effortlessly trumps its competitors (in spite of the raging internet appreciation for Samsung’s expensive NC10), I found myself unable to restrict my netbook usage to a point where I wasn’t constantly wanting more from the machine. Heavy and hilariously CPU-inefficient Flash video (thanks Adobe) brings the Atom to its knees, and 600 vertical pixels means that you’d better enjoy a fullscreened web browser. I think 10-inch netbooks are going to need to settle on 1366×768 or 1280×720 screens in order to really be usable, and it’s great to see preliminary offerings with those options in the HP 2140 and the Dell Mini 10.

    But with all the Nvidia Ion and HDMI-out excitement on the horizon, right now is a dubious time to buy. Netbooks will certainly turn $2,500+ “ultraportables” into a relic of the past, but they aren’t there yet, and I think that’s why we’re sitting here debating the value proposition of the X200 vs. a refurb MB Air.

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  4. Christopher Price
    Christopher Price January 18, 2009 at 6:39 pm |

    Compared to the Atom-based desktops that are selling for the $200 to $250 price range, yes, the Mac mini would be a more powerful option.

    But, to answer your question about why Apple’s trackpad support can’t do multi-touch in Windows… it’s not just Apple’s fault. Microsoft has no multi-touch support in the operating system right now. None. There’s no basis for Apple to begin with. Competitors like Synaptics have very poor multi-touch support for the same reason… and they cater to PC OEMs!

    It’s not clear if Windows 7 will add multi-touch support to the trackpad, like they are doing (with copying Surface technology) on the screen. If they did have a native multi-touch interface for pointing devices, I would agree that Apple should support it.

    And, I’m quite happy that Apple gets out of the way with software on Windows. The last thing I want when I power on a new PC, is to spend a good hour in Programs and Features uninstalling all the crud that comes along. Unfortunately, I don’t know of one new PC I’ve been able to avoid that on…

    I sincerely doubt Ion will outpace the MacBook Air in performance, since most of the systems running it will be Atom-based (or, will go the second-gen MacBook Air route and use a Penryn… and tack on a $1500 to $2000 price tag in the process). And, from what I’ve seen with Apple’s HDMI copy protection exceptions… I’m glad I have a DVI port (something I’ve also blogged in the past on).

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  5. Mark Laughlin
    Mark Laughlin June 9, 2009 at 2:07 pm |

    Every time a new Mac notebook line comes out I hurry to see if Apple added a pointstick. For serious “lean forward” computer users, the pointstick is a huge producticity enhancer. I do like the Mac touch pad gestures, but without the ability to navigate the mouse and type almost simultaneously, the Mac notebooks are relegated to leisure use…no matter how much I like the OS.

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  6. Preston
    Preston November 29, 2009 at 6:41 pm |

    Windows 7 does have touch gestures. I am reading the welcome booklet now, it is called Windows Touch. It supports scrolling, panning, right clicking and zooming all similar to mac.

    As for price if you get away from the lousy OEM’s (Apple included) and custom build a PC you will get the same performance for less than half the price of an Apple computer with better hardware, warranties and reliability.

    So, Apple Tax if you want to call it that. Lets figure a custom build system versus a baseline mac pro. The hardware is identical the motherboards are from the same manufacturer (yes they make a PC version aswell)
    Prices based on Newegg.com
    8 core MacPro =
    Dual LGA 771 Motherboard ($500)
    2 x 2.93GHz QC Nehalem ($1000)
    6x1GB RAM ($120)
    640GB HDD ($60)
    GeForce GT 120 512MB GFX ($130)
    DVD drive ($18)
    Mouse+Keyboard ($20)
    Case ($150)
    PSU 1000W ($100)
    Total = 2098
    -$5899
    OSX = $3801

    So essentially I can build a much faster and better computer for $2098 with IDENTICAL specs and all my hardware is 1000X BETTER and more RELIABLE than Apples.
    Oh, BTW thats an 180%+ Markup on Apple products so on a Mac Pro they are getting over 4k on every 8 core Mac Pro they sell…
    Quite a bit of Profit but you just love to pay 4k more for an apple logo right?

    I have been eyeing this build for my multimedia production, I think it would be great with Windows 7 on it. Personally I wouldn’t invest anything into apple, history has shown that as soon as Jobs quits Apple will become an eyesore in the computer market once again.

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